Hedonistic Collection
by Miss Peg
Summary: A Mentalist/Skins crossover collection. Current Update: Brothers In Arms
1. Can't Read You

**Title**: I Can't Read You Like a Book

**Rating**: PG

**Summary**: Jane meets a stranger on the beach...

**Disclaimer**: I wish either TV programme were mine, but no.

**Notes**: Written for a holiday fic challenge on livejournal, one of two Skins/Mentalist crossovers which will share this collection. For reddawg82's prompt I can't read you like a book about the characters Jane from The Mentalist and Effy from Skins.

x

The beach lay empty in the early evening as Jane sunk his toes into the damp sand. He preferred it damp because it moved like silly putty and he could use it to make anything he wanted. That evening he made a tunnel with cars driving along the road he built on top. He didn't really know why, except that the act of creation made him feel calm and at peace with his surroundings. Sometimes his mind worked at lightning speed and he could barely control the things he thought about and he needed something to dispel the darkness within.

That evening, though the beach lay empty, Jane could feel a pair of eyes watching him. He dusted the sand off his slacks and looked around. There up on the rocks sat a girl with pale skin and dark brown curls.

He'd never seen her before and he frequented that beach often, it wasn't exactly a beach that the regular crowd would visit on a vacation. That's why he liked it so much, the only people who visited were dog walkers, local surfers and other residents of the area.

She continued to look at him as he stared back at her.

She couldn't have been much older than nineteen; she looked lonely and lost, her eyes downturned in sorrow. She had demons that could have potentially outweighed his own though he wasn't entirely sure what they would be.

It still shocked him to find anyone so young, so troubled. He considered himself too young to be so troubled and she was at least half his age.

She eventually stood up from the rocks and climbed down them as she walked slowly towards him, her whole body gliding as she stepped down onto the sand.

'I can't read you,' she whispered, her British accent startlingly obvious. She creased her eyebrows and stood firmly on the spot, as though she were a cowboy preparing to drive him out of town.

'I can't read you either,' he replied, her air of confidence a surprise as her seductive appearance left him befuddled.

She smiled and though it didn't quite reach her eyes he knew she meant it. Whoever she was, whatever she was doing there, he'd met his match. Before he could ask her any questions or seek to know more about her she glided away across the sand.


	2. Brothers In Arms

**Title**: Brothers In Arms

**Author**: miss_peg

**Rating**: PG

**Summary**: Red John isn't the only John in his family...

**Disclaimer**: Neither belongs to me...pity.

**Notes**: Written for a holiday fic challenge on LJ, for Red's prompt Brothers In Arms about Red John from The Mentalist and John Foster from Skins.

A long time ago in a village in Sussex, England, he lived a different life. He grew up one of two boys, twins. A family blessed with love and hope and desire to live the good life. Every Christmas, he'd run down the stairs with his brother, John; fighting to be the first one at the door to the lounge to see if Father Christmas had visited. Every year, he beat him to prime position, but it no longer mattered because they were inside the room, tearing open their gifts, in no time at all. On their birthdays, their mother would make them breakfast in bed and sit on a wooden chair in the centre of the room, watching them explore their birthday presents. At the weekends, she and their father would take them to the park where they would have a picnic, or play football, or visit a castle or museum. In the summer they took the ferry across the English Channel to France; they'd spend two weeks building sandcastles, eating croissants and crepes and walking through historic villages.

Until their twelfth birthday, when they woke up to no breakfast, or presents, just their parents, slaughtered in their bed.

In the years that followed, he lived a solitary life. Despite having John by his side in the foster home, he couldn't stop thinking about the blood or the way their parent's bodies had been carved up like pieces of meat. He knew that John had adjusted to their new life and the social worker assigned to them constantly compared them like they were two peas in a pod. But they weren't. They were twins, biologically, yet emotionally they were strangers. Where John had grown up with the desire to understand the world around him, to understand what kind of person mutilated someone else, he merely fixated his attention on death.

It wasn't until he turned eighteen and could escape the clutches of his foster family that he changed his life completely. He took the money his parents had left him and fled across the Atlantic Ocean to America, the land of opportunity.

Somewhere along the way his fixation of death became a desire to murder.

He didn't think about John again until the day his new name landed in the newspapers; "Red John". He didn't choose the name, nor did he really care for it. If anything, it made him feel miserable and lonely for the first time since crossing the Atlantic. He'd never missed his brother before and now, everyone knew him by a name which wasn't even his. He'd become infamous, a cut above the rest, the greatest serial killer that ever lived and that was an achievement he wasn't willing to lay to rest.

The only time he went back to England after that was after a brief phone call with his foster mother. She could barely get out the words in order to explain that his brother had been killed, beaten to death with his own bat after he'd apparently killed a young boy. For the first time since their parent's death, he found himself relating to his twin, a strange sense of relief that it wasn't just him that had lost their sense of light.

So he travelled to England for the funeral and to slaughter the man that killed his brother.


End file.
